The turkey oak can grow practically submerged within the wetlands of Mississippi, its leaves soft as a newborn's skin.

I've moved to Australia, to amazing parents who gave me unconditional love, to being educated and submerged in an amazing country and society.

In France, successive waves of Gaul, Visigoth, and Frank have swept over the land and have dominated it. But the fair hair and blue eyes and the clear skin of the conquering races have been submerged by the rising and overflow of the dusky blood of the original population.

I think the sheer number of pop stars has kind of drowned out, somewhat, our interest. We're just submerged.

I remember being shocked when I came out from under the focusing cloth after a minute or two being submerged within that, at the startling green color of those ferns.

And in the afternoon they entered a land - but such a land! A land hung in mourning, darkened by gigantic cypresses, submerged; a land of reptiles, silence, shadow, decay.

Sea-Monkeys are hybrid brine shrimp and the brainchild of the mail-order entrepreneur Harold von Braunhut in 1957. When their crystallized eggs are submerged in water, minuscule crustaceans emerge; they can grow up to 2 inches long.

I submerged myself in all the information that I could find about Idi Amin. I mean, before I left Los Angeles, I was studying Kiswahili. I was working on the dialect. I was studying every documentary and tape of him that I could find - not just visual, but also audiocassettes, even in other languages when he was speaking in other dialects.

Halston was one of the hardest-working designers I have come across. The way he cut, moulded, manipulated and draped fabric was inspiring. I was submerged into the Halston subculture alongside Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, Elizabeth Taylor and Truman Capote. They shaped who I have become as a designer.

When I started making music, I was so heavy into the hyphy movement. That's something you only know so much about if you were right there living in it, submerged in the culture.

As children, as we learn what things are, we are slowly learning to dismiss them visually. As adults, entirely submerged in words and concepts, we spend almost all of our time thinking and worrying about the past and the future, hardly ever looking at or engaging with the world visually.

A reader is not supposed to be aware that someone's written the story. He's supposed to be completely immersed, submerged in the environment.

I don't want to be submerged by depression.

Yet it is in our idleness, in our dreams, that the submerged truth sometimes comes to the top.

With 'Honeymoon,' it was so intimate, and we literally shot it in something like 20, 24 days. Everything was very rapid and very fast, and so all of us submerged into the deep end and only really came up for air once we had wrapped.

At some point, I picked up an old library copy of 'To The Lighthouse' someone had bought for 25 cents. I began to read and didn't stop until the sun had blistered my back. A mysterious rightness, a beautiful submerged truth had invaded me, one that has ever since seemed slightly beyond my grasp.

My life as an actor has submerged me completely because I don't know why.

Why have we had to invent Eden, to live submerged in the nostalgia of a lost paradise, to make up utopias, propose a future for ourselves?

I respected it. I submerged myself into it. So on a lot of days off I would go and fish with the fishermen and the families that ran the boats. I would go work the fields with farmers. I would go and talk with farmers about growing particular products for me.

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.